Taking Matters Into My Own Hands

I’d like to think of El and I as good tenants. We got our place through Airbnb, so that much of the headache associated with renting an apartment for 2 months was taken care of through them. Since our time here, we have only had to contact the owner a couple of times. Once when we accidentally tripped the circuit breaker, he had to come show us how to reset it. Once to ask if we could get a key for the compostable garbage can near the building to dispose of our waste properly. Once to ask about getting an extra set of bedding for our overnight guest. And today.
One of the inconveniences in this place is the shower. There is a pressure issue where it drops from strong enough to inflict pain to dead within seconds only to leave you standing there with soap in your eyes wondering if it will be 15 seconds or 5 minutes before pressure returns. Additionally, there is no shelving or rack system, so all of your bottles of stuff sit on the floor. The hot water is hotter than any human can stand and in the small stall is it easy to accidentally nudge the handle from the comfortable to the dangerous position. And then there is the draining issue. The walk-in shower has a lip of an inch or two the top of which anchors the sliding door track. The thing is that when the water is coming out at high pressure, when the drain is a little slow, it does not take long to actually fill the floor of the small stall to where it gets perilously close to spilling over the lip. So, we called the owner.
El told him that we were having an issue with the shower drain and wanted to know if there was anything we should do. He said he would come by and check it out. And, while I would give him an ‘A’ for response time, what we got was squarely a 'D’ level response. He looked at the shower. El turned it on to show him that it was draining slow. He looked back at the shower and said "OK, I will have someone come to look at it...after you leave in two weeks." On the one hand I want to say, hey, we did our part to alert him of the problem and if water spills over, that's on him. On the other hand, there is a reason I’d like to think of El and I as good tenants. 
So, while out and about today I stopped at a detergent shop. I am not sure what they are really called, but the name on the stores are similar to “detergent” and it is a store that sells only products you would find in the detergent aisle of a supermarket. Dish soap. Laundry soap. Bar soap. Shampoo. Car wax. Bug repellent. Things of this nature. Armed with Google Translate, I walked into a detergent shop and spoke “I need a liquid that will fix a clogged shower drain” and held my phone up to the cashier to read. The phrase translated and she took me directly to the shelf with the local equivalent of Liquid Plumr, Mr. Muscle it is called. After confirming some of the directions with El, over the next hour, I fixed the drain. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be so happy (enough to write a blogpost about it), but it was the process of finding a store that sells such a product, using the tools to communicate my needs, and actually doing the job that I thought should have been taken care of by the owner.
We now have a perfectly working drain, and I can be happy that I overcame a challenge in this foreign land. Mission accomplished.

worked like a charm